San Felice del Benaco

Before being the happy inlet it was the reef. Until the fifteenth century the documented name is Scovolo, from scopulus, and only later did the Latin reading sinus felix take hold. In between lies a violent fact: in 1279 the Guelphs of Brescia razed the castle of Scovolo and its borgo together with the fortress of Manerba, and the people of the San Fermo promontory had to redistribute themselves into the two new nuclei of San Felice and Portese, each with its own defences. Today's village was born like that, out of a demolition.

In 1334 thirty-four communities of the Brescian shore of Garda and of the Val Sabbia federated so as to depend neither on Brescia nor on Verona and asked Venice for protection: from there would grow the Magnifica Patria of the Riviera of Salò. San Felice and Portese became a single municipality again in 1928. Three thousand four hundred and three inhabitants in the province of Brescia, on a morainic headland between the gulf of Salò and that of Manerba; the Isola del Garda also belongs to the municipality. The sanctuary of the Carmine was begun in 1460 and consecrated in 1482.